User's Manual

5-40 Chapter 5: Software support
5.4 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with three RAID controllers that allow you to congure
SATA / SAS hard disk drives as RAID sets.
• The NVIDIA
®
nForce
®
790i Ultra SLI™ SATA RAID includes a high
performance SATA RAID controller that supports RAID 0, 1, 10, and 5 for six
independent Serial ATA channels.
•
Marvell
®
88SE6121 eSATA RAID.
Enabled by Marvell
®
88SE6121 controller,
the Marvell
®
RAID supports RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5 sets and extends the
advantages of software RAID beyond internal hard disk drives to external hard
disk drives or port-multiplier devices.
•
Marvell
®
88SE6320 SAS RAID.
Enabled by Marvell
®
88SE6320 controller, the
Marvell
®
SAS RAID supports RAID 0 and 1 for two independent SAS channels.
5.4.1 RAID denitions
RAID 0 (Data striping) optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write
data in parallel, interleaved stacks. Two hard disks perform the same work as a
single drive but at a sustained data transfer rate, double that of a single disk alone,
thus improving data access and storage. Use of two new identical hard disk drives
is required for this setup.
RAID 1 (Data mirroring) copies and maintains an identical image of data from
one drive to a second drive. If one drive fails, the disk array management software
directs all applications to the surviving drive as it contains a complete copy of
the data in the other drive. This RAID conguration provides data protection and
increases fault tolerance to the entire system. Use two new drives or use an
existing drive and a new drive for this setup. The new drive must be of the same
size or larger than the existing drive.
RAID 5 stripes both data and parity information across three or more hard
disk drives. Among the advantages of RAID 5 conguration include better
HDD performance, fault tolerance, and higher storage capacity. The RAID
5 conguration is best suited for transaction processing, relational database
applications, enterprise resource planning, and other business systems. Use a
minimum of three identical hard disk drives for this setup.
RAID 10 is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy
data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID 10* conguration you get
all the benets of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 congurations. Use four new hard disk
drives or use an existing drive and three new drives for this setup.
If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a created RAID
set, copy rst the RAID driver from the support DVD to a oppy disk before you
install an operating system to the selected hard disk drive. Refer to section
5.5
Creating a RAID driver disk
for details.